Help For A Guy Getting Back In The Game

[Oldskooltape]

It's been years since I last was part of the home recording game and I need some advice. First, I have a Tascam Portastudio MKII that I purchased when they first came out years ago. Myself and misc. bands, friends etc recorded tons of stuff with that thing for a decade or so. This has left me with several hundred tapes that have been well preserved but need to be preserved further. I'm a guitar player of 25+ years and would also like to get back in the recording game as well. So, my question is twofold. First, what are your suggestions on the best, most high quality ways to transfer my old tapes to digital (I also have a fairly new and souped up MacBook Pro)? Second, what are some things I should do to build a new home recording studio - starting off? Any suggestions or info are appreciated. I would love to preserve my tapes the best way possible and most are multi-track originals that I would like to edit digitally.

 

[Chris Marcelli]

First, I recall that the 424 MKII has tape outs for each track. Correct?

Second, will you be recording drums or live takes when you build your studio?

If yes, you are going to want an interface with at least 8 inputs (probably more). You will only need 4 of those inputs to archive your 4 Track tapes. In short, your Tascam is well suited to the archiving process with its individual track tape outputs and your studio needs will be more than sufficient to handle archiving.

I bought an external hard drive to store the hours and hours of 4 Track archive files I made. It's probably overkill, but I used 24 bit / 96 kHz sampling.

Finally, make sure you clean the heads after each tape and degauss after a couple of hours.